I know there's predominant thinking that "communism" existed somewhere, but in fact it doesn't. It was the ideology developed in the West and brutally imported into the East. Why I say that and why it matters to understand the difference?
Because there was no "communist" thinking behind the motivation to do whatever by the ordinary people. There was something deeper that manifested in a way that many people mistake for "communist" thinking. And that's natural, because people's thinking is not same in the West as in the East, and even more in far-East.
Ok, enough on that, everyone's right to call it whatever they want, just pitching some clues that can help avoiding the cliché.
My journey also started when first seeing IMKO-2 in 1984, then there was a popular magazine for the young "engineers" called "МЛАД КОНСТРУКТОР" (full archive here https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0Bw941VGG9Tjc... )that started publishing a course of BASIC. So I learned virtually and even wrote programs on paper before the first actual contact with the computer, which happened 1 year later on the newly acquired by my school couple of PRAVETZ-82.
This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town.
So it's cool to see that Bulgaria managed to muster enough government interest to force a cohesive strategy for the whole country. It sounds like it paid off.
Also, after googling for Правец, I have found out that I can in fact read Bulgarian, which was quite surprising to me.
Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well.
Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the mix. There could've been even more, but a combination of distrust towards the new capitalist science and later unwillingness for those pesky machines to show the real state of the USSR economy meant that this was not developed with the full backing of the eastern block.
You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art.
Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.
One thing to understand about communism is that lots of people believed in it, but for the most part the communist elites considered it a feudal system where one's access to resources made them valuable and gave them power. Anything that would provide the higher ups transparency and accountability would be ruinous for the balance of power and therefore met significant pushback. There was never a technocratic communism because idealists would be either defanged to act as specialist executor clas or outright removed as unreliable players.
Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.
> Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind.
Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.
Very interesting article. It's always fascinating for me as someone from Gen Z, to see how the computers worked in the beginning, and the stories behind them.
I think my reaction is mostly puzzlement. I can see a sensible point or several in the article, but I was not always sure how big a point the author was trying to make.
At the narrower level, it seems to be saying that benchmarks are easier to interpret when you know what they really are. That makes sense. If a circuit is known to be a multiplier, that tells you more than if it is just called `c6288`.
That is also why I thought of Python benchmarks. In something like `pyperformance`, names such as `json_loads`, `python_startup`, or `nbody` already tell you something about the workload. So when you compare results, you have a better sense of what kind of task a system is doing well on. But so what? It is just benchmarks. They don't guarantee anything about anything anyway.
What made it harder for me to follow was that this fairly modest point is wrapped in a lot of jokes and swipes about AI and corporate AI language. Some of that is funny, but it also made me less sure what the main point was supposed to be. Was the article really about benchmark interpretation, or was that mostly a vehicle for making a broader point about AI hype and technical understanding?
So I do think there is a real point in there. I just found it slightly hard to separate that point from the style and the jokes.
Did you read an LLM summary of the article? It mentions all of those topics but none of them in the way you say.
The article describes a reverse-engineering effort in Bulgaria during Soviet times, but doesn't say anything anti-communist, just that direct commerce with the West was not possible at that time. It relates that effort to the author's motivation for working on an open-source circuit analyzer, and takes a pretty strong stance against uncritically adopting technology without any attempt at understanding how it works.
"AMD’s AI director reports that Claude Code has become “dumber and lazier” since February, based on analysis of 6,852 sessions and 234,760 tool calls, which is the most thorough performance review any AI has received and rather more than most human employees get."
Are there any good ways to measure agent ability? Or do we just have to go by vibes?
So it's cool to see that Bulgaria managed to muster enough government interest to force a cohesive strategy for the whole country. It sounds like it paid off.
Also, after googling for Правец, I have found out that I can in fact read Bulgarian, which was quite surprising to me.
Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the mix. There could've been even more, but a combination of distrust towards the new capitalist science and later unwillingness for those pesky machines to show the real state of the USSR economy meant that this was not developed with the full backing of the eastern block.
Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.
Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.
Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.
At the narrower level, it seems to be saying that benchmarks are easier to interpret when you know what they really are. That makes sense. If a circuit is known to be a multiplier, that tells you more than if it is just called `c6288`.
That is also why I thought of Python benchmarks. In something like `pyperformance`, names such as `json_loads`, `python_startup`, or `nbody` already tell you something about the workload. So when you compare results, you have a better sense of what kind of task a system is doing well on. But so what? It is just benchmarks. They don't guarantee anything about anything anyway.
What made it harder for me to follow was that this fairly modest point is wrapped in a lot of jokes and swipes about AI and corporate AI language. Some of that is funny, but it also made me less sure what the main point was supposed to be. Was the article really about benchmark interpretation, or was that mostly a vehicle for making a broader point about AI hype and technical understanding?
So I do think there is a real point in there. I just found it slightly hard to separate that point from the style and the jokes.
The article describes a reverse-engineering effort in Bulgaria during Soviet times, but doesn't say anything anti-communist, just that direct commerce with the West was not possible at that time. It relates that effort to the author's motivation for working on an open-source circuit analyzer, and takes a pretty strong stance against uncritically adopting technology without any attempt at understanding how it works.
quote please
> generously sprinkled with anti-communism
quote please
Are there any good ways to measure agent ability? Or do we just have to go by vibes?